Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

She was still not afraid but looked about, mostly with a strange wonder that they were at last together, and together in such an odd and bright place of food and people and things to clean the kitchen floor with. Only here only at Safeway can you get the best bargain for your dollars… The sign on the display of canned pinto beans said eight for a dollar. It occurred to Laverne that that might be a particularly good price, but she could not remember if her husband or son liked pinto beans. It was when she looked back at the Devil that the smell of him came drifting her way, a nonthreatening fragrance that didn’t mind taking all the time it needed to get to her. It was a wonderful though subtle cologne that for Laverne simply said everything good about men. No doubt, the man in the apartment downstairs from hers had a similar smell, though when that man washed his car in his T-shirt and shorts there was just the sweat, or so she thought as she looked down at him from behind her curtain. Look up this way. Don’t look up here… She had not yet gotten close to the man downstairs and so could only imagine how he smelled as he stepped out of his apartment dressed to kill and went to his car with yet another new woman on his arm and opened his car door for the woman and watched her take her sophisticated time settling down on his bucket seat. A final look up at the man before he shut the door. Her husband believed that a man did not have to perfume himself as long as he bathed every day. It would be her luck, she thought, if there were no specials on Dial soap that day. “Himself been studyin you,” the Devil said, quietly now, as if he were sharing the great secret of her life.

Laverne stepped away from the Devil and the cart and walked uneasily out of the Safeway.

On dishrag legs, she made her way a block and a half up Good Hope Road, and on a bench in front of Cleopatra’s Hair Emporium, she sat, the crumpled shopping list in her left hand resting on the green bench. She was back in the world, back in life, and was so glad that she felt like reaching out and touching a body or two passing by the Emporium. Two women went into Cleopatra’s, and one of the women was saying she really wanted some bangs, but her companion told her bangs would make her face look fat. “But I really want them bangs,” the first woman insisted before they closed the door to the Emporium. Laverne crossed her legs and with the tips of her fingers rearranged her skirt down over her legs. Himself been studyin you… For the third time that morning she wished she had not stopped smoking. It was near about twelve o’clock.

She considered calling her mother, or her mother’s wealthy mother, who had known the Devil mostly in his guise of an old woman for nearly sixty years. She turned her head and looked into the window of the beauty parlor. The woman who wanted the bangs was being seated in a chair two seats from the window. In the chair at the window was an old woman who was getting her black hair unfurled from light blue curlers; standing beside the woman was a little girl who could have been the woman’s granddaughter. The girl’s hair was done up quite nicely and she seemed to be watching the old woman and her hair as if to make certain that the same care was given to her grandmother. The woman who wanted the bangs was talking, talking a mile a minute to Cleopatra, who waded through the woman’s hair with her fingers in preparation for the job ahead. Laverne’s mother would be back from confession and mass by now. She went to church every day. Laverne could see herself getting up, putting the dime into the pay phone next to the beauty shop, could see herself dialing her mother’s number and hearing the promising ring, but she could not see beyond that.

She had, after the birth of her son, tried to do good to put off as long as possible this day, the day of meeting the Devil. Sending money to the Salvation Army. Going to church every week until all that singing and preaching began to depress her. Trying to banish impure thoughts. And in the last place they had lived, on Maple View, she had befriended a dying man, Mansfield Harper, had even held his hand in those moments before he died the evening Mansfield’s woman had stepped away on an errand. His fingers had wiggled there at the end and, because she had not known Mansfield’s sins, Laverne had thought the wiggling meant he was on his way to heaven. But all that good had not put off this day.

She had paid little attention to the story that the Devil had a special thing for the women on both sides of her family, a thing born with Eve. It was said that all the women in her family had the answer to a riddle that would make the Devil the King of Heaven. All he had to do was pose the riddle in the right way to the right woman, alive or dead, and the answer would send God tumbling from his throne and down to the narrow perch the Devil had been consigned to for all history. And so the Devil had sought out all the women in her family, sought out millennia of women who had known the big and small of life before Laverne but who had failed to tell the Devil the answer of the ages. Laverne’s great-aunt’s grandmother had said that if the Devil could get the right woman in hell, he would have an eternity, small time for him, to get what he wanted. Morning after morning, that grandmother had said, he could wake the right woman on her bed of fire and ask about the answer.

Now the Devil had knocked at her door.

Laverne looked at the shopping list and then put it back in her sweater pocket and patted the pocket. She lived to dance, lived to party, even though her mother liked to remind her that she was now married with a child and another waiting in the wings. A friend across the Anacostia River in Northwest was giving a party that Saturday night and it was all Laverne had been able to think about for days. She tried not to place herself in the middle of the party, abandoning herself the way she was known to do, sweating gloriously from all the dancing with black men made to make her knees buckle. Her husband was a dancer, too, had met her on a dance floor in someone’s apartment, but he had long since stopped trying to keep up with Laverne. He sent her off and told her go and be happy. She labored now to put herself on the floor of the party to come that night, but once more she could not place herself where she wanted.

Acar going up Good Hope Road tooted its horn at her, but she did not hear it. Her mother said all Anacostia seemed to know her. After several minutes she closed her eyes and took herself down Good Hope, across the bridge and out through Washington, through Maryland until she was on the August beach fourteen years ago, the Atlantic Ocean only a few yards away and the heat waves shimmering all along the dull blue horizon, one seagull conversing with another. She was wearing her cousin’s bathing suit and sitting on the beach with her feet dug into the sand, snuggled close to her paternal grandmother, who was in her afterchurch, all-day Sunday dress. And on the other side of the grandmother were Laverne’s brothers, boys of eight and five years. Laverne’s father and mother had gone to a refreshment stand near the parking lot to buy snacks. The beach was full of colored people.

What her grandmother had heard before she was compelled to stand up, Laverne never knew, but once her grandmother did stand up, the voice was clear for all the Negroes along the beach to hear. Only her grandmother, after putting on her shoes, moved toward the water and the voice. And, as if there were a silent command, those Negroes who had been swimming came out of the water and looked at the horizon, from where the voice was coming. There was a kind of roar that seemed to ascend from the ocean, and another roar that seemed to descend from the sky, and there at eye level, the roars became words. The voice, emphatically clear and distinct, was not female and it was not male.